María Esperanza Rama Martínez

Esperanza Rama Martínez is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, French and German Studies at the University of Vigo. She earned a degree in English Philology from the University of Santiago de Compostela in 1990. A year later she completed an MA in Applied Linguistics (Discourse Studies for Language Teaching and Learning) at the University of Liverpool (United Kingdom). Upon returning to the USC, she obtained her PhD in English Philology in 2001 with a thesis entitled Political Interviews, Talk Show Interviews, and Debates on British TV: A Contrastive Study of the Interactional Organisation of Three Broadcast Genres. She is currently a member of the UVigo research group Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LVTC) and serves as co-editor of the journal Babel-AFIAL: Aspectos de Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemá, published by the same university. Her research primarily focuses on conversation analysis, pragmatics and suprasegmental phonetics. Within these areas, she explores spoken interaction in institutional contexts such as courtrooms and television. Her work pays particular attention to the structural elements of dialogue (turn taking, sequences, preference, openings and closings); the relationship between discourse roles and the use and types of grammatical fragments; the contribution of prosody and kinesics to spoken interaction, with special emphasis on interruptive behaviour. She also investigates the use and typology of speech acts and politeness strategies in relation to communicative goals. An additional research line is centered on critical discourse analysis, examining the relation between power dynamics and the functions associated with specific institutional roles.